April 2010 Archives

Quarantine Project Day 40

Well that's it for the other one, as they say.  The forty day project is up, and I can report a total word-count just shy of 70,000 words.

It's not a complete first-draft because the resolution isn't there yet, and the resolution to a novel or a story is the single most important piece in the jigsaw, which is why so many "literary" novels don't have a resolution.  However, the resolution, though it isn't written yet, is well-formed in my mind.  There are some plot points to work out yet, but plot points are so much less important than the resolution.  Plot is variable; resolution, as my Latin friends tell me, is the sine qua non.

The truth is that I would never anyway have any idea about how long or short a first draft might be; but one thing of which I am certain is that the writing of this blog has encouraged me to produce my rough draft - my first draft - in a much shorter period of time than would have happened ordinarily.

The real work will begin after the completion of this first draft.  Draft 2 will be when I bring in the heavy earth-moving equipment so that I can shift scenes around, delete chapters, fill-in new ones and smooth out those major inconsistencies caused by re-routing as I went along.  Subsequent drafts will then employ more sensitive equipment until the final draft will be all about sentence-by-sentence polishing.

To those of you who have stuck with this blog - I appreciate it!  It has helped to know that some of you have followed it faithfully.  Plus I seem to have picked up the blog habit, so I might well continue the blog, widening it to include other things, such as my hatred of the casting of a child as the new Dr Who and other rabid prejudices.  But I will also report on the progress of this novel, (maybe reporting it as Quarantine Project + 1 etc).

But not for a couple of days because I'm off to Germany on book business.  Auf Wiedersehen for now

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

Quarantine Project Day 35

Meetings set me back for Day 35 but I still managed to find some time for writing, probably because I've hit the acceleration point in the plot.  (Don't google it, I just made it up, so I'll try to define it.) 

That is to say, you assemble a cast of characters and push them up a hill until their aggregate weight demands that they roll down the other side of the hill.  There is a human trajectory to a series of interactions, and if you've done a reasonable job the answers to what they will or won't do start to provide themselves.  That's not the same as knowing the ending.  It's just that possibilities for different endings begin to thin out.  If a character has behaved in a certain way throughout a novel, you as a writer cannot ask her (or persuade your readers to accept) that she is going to do something that confounds the trajectory.  Your characters no longer have free will.

So I've hit that acceleration point, and the words are coming easier.  Finding an effective resolution is another issue. 

On a busy day I'll happily take a 1154 word-count

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 33

Got my mojo back today, as they say in some parts, and broke the 2K happy line.  I have only a vague idea what a mojo is.  It's certainly American, or African-American, and probably voodoo, but I'm glad I got it after the trials of the previous day, and I'd quite like to hang on to it. 

'Mr Joyce, thit is an Amiricinsm,' as my English teacher used to say, 'and in my class an Amiricinism is an affectation up with which I shall not put.'  I went to a large comprehensive school and this drip had been to Cambridge or some place where they used to put water on their combs, and he took me to task in my essays for using transgressive words like Okay and monkey wrench and parking lot.

Even today I have to suggest to students to break free of the spiritually dead conformist bureaucratic English prose that would get you high marks at school or college but which suffocate literature.  Thankfully the informal and exuberant constructions of American literature showed the way even back then, when I was probably trying to import language from American super-hero comics into my essays.

So I looked at why yesterday's work was so stiff and I could see it was choked with formality.  Once I'd spotted that it was... mojo rising.

Not only that but from sweet informality my title came to me.  What is it?  Sorry, can't tell you.  But I'll tell you this: 2083 words today.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 32

Fighting it out today, it was, and what came was not good quality.  It's the kind of stuff that has to be either seriously re-worked later or discarded.  But it has to stay in place as it is right now because it is the bridge to tomorrow's work, which I hope will be better.

I'm not sure if it was Tchaikovsky - if not, some classical great - who said that his overtures were bits of inspirational work bolted together by a lot of dull but necessary engineering.  What a generous remark.  It helps enormously to understand how the creative arts work.  You hope that God or Nature sends you a line or two of pure inspiration and then you roll up your sleeves for the rest of it.

Only a late rush gave me a decent word-count.  Were it not for this blog I wouldn't have got past 500 words, but I would have blushed to report that.  I seemed to spend most of the day making coffee and fumbling about with my guitar; and then feeling sheepish for having spent the day drinking coffee and playing only the easy chords.  So, even if no-one is reading this, the illusion that they are is motivating me to persist.

Sleeves-rolled, sooty-faced engineering has bolted together an industrial 1764 words.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 31

A teaching day today, so got very little writing done.  But because I'd been mouthing off yesterday about rhythm in prose I decided to spend a half-hour-or-so window writing in long-hand.  I mean on paper.  I mean with a pen.  Yes!  Scratching glyphs on a piece of tree, compressed, pulped and bleached!  What a shock to recall how it feels!  Like suddenly remembering you know how to speak Latin or Greek.  Or that you'd learned marquetry in a passed life.

 Guess I just wanted to see if it affected the rhythm of my writing and of course it does.  There is such an intimacy in writing with a... well, not a feathered quill, but an implement that whispers to the paper in place of the usual keyboard rattling.  But the danger is, like a visit to the fairy realm, time passes differently.  The intimate whispering can easily persuade you that those extra adjectives and adverbs have their place after all.  And of course they do, under another star, but we all know what happens when you find your way back from the fairy realm: time has rushed by and everyone else has grown old.

As for the teaching of writing, I was in the middle of giving my normal feedback - not harsh, but as clear and balanced and as helpful as I could make it - and I saw that the author of the manuscript under examination, a lovely young woman, was in tears at my comments.  Oh God, that's not the idea of teaching.  Sometimes I want to say: don't listen to me, just write and then write more, and more again.

Hand-crafted, but perhaps of higher count in another realm: 564 words

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 30

Someone asked me what music I listened to while I'm writing.  I must have had my jaw open too long by way of response, but the question did astonish me.  I can't listen to any music while I'm writing.

Firstly the idea of any lyrics yodelling in the background would probably make me want to break something; but I can't deal with instrumentation either.  On casual enquiry I find that quite a few writers do play background music while they are working.

They must be wired differently is all I can say.

I have this notion - foolish mayhaps - that prose writing is a rhythmic and temporal art.  That is to say, whatever the style or the content or the genre, the idea is to seduce the reader with engaging rhythms, like a poet but not so much.  The basic English language is spoken in the only slightly varied iambic pentameter of one unstressed followed by one stressed beat.  So when old Billy Shakespeare says, in strict iambic pentameter:

            Now all the youth of England are on fire

he is only simulating the natural rhythm of the English language, but formally.

So, writing is also about sustaining, varying and operating a very strict control of the cumulative rhythms of the language.  Don't matter how informal you make it.  And if you have music playing behind you, isn't that going to govern and manipulate the beat?  Or at the very least influence it when you are in the semi-trance state of writing.

My story.  My book.  My rhythms. I don't care if it's Bach; I want some bloody quiet around here. 

Written today without the unconscious assist of music: 1916 words

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

I've been in the French Alps for two weeks holiday, but it didn't seem sensible to announce that on the internet.  Hence the pause in the Quarantine Project.   Anyway I'm sort of sick of thundering down the black slopes trying to keep up with the savages so I'm quite happy to get back to the sedate business of writing.

Something mildly alarming does happen when I stop writing.  I get odd, dislocating moments of random character rush.  At unpredictable times I'm likely to become an ebullient Greek or a bitter Mancunian or a parsimonious Yorkshireman in a short, semi-comic flight of improvised ranting.  Black slope? Call that a black slope?  Why when I were a lad we'd slide down slag heaps steeper than that etc. I don't know where it comes from but it's an affliction that tends to swell in direct relationship to the number of days taken off from the word-mines.  It annoys the hell out of the savages, which is a positive, but it does take even me by surprise occasionally.

Everyone, then, is sort of relieved when I get back to work and this multiple-personality-disorder begins to subside.

Though the break did have me rethinking one or two things about the work-in-progress.  I was half way down an icy mogul-mangled black run in Les Arcs when I decided to drop a particular plot point (a pregnancy, since you ask, which was rather too similar to a situation I used in the soon-to-be published The Silent Land.)  It was a bit of a sudden body swerve.  (In the plot, not the skiing.)  Anyway I'm not going to tinker with earlier pages.  I intend to press on and discard all that now redundant stuff in Draft 2. 

Look, don't think for one second I'm going to discard the word-count for those previous pages. Oh no.  You don't get away with that, dear reader.

And as for the word-count, today's waxed and edged skis carve out a trim 1969.  Hey!  Moon landings!  Erm.

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